Menu

Google is using AI to help The New York Times digitize 5 million historic photos

The New York Times doesn’t keep bodies in its “morgue” — it keeps pictures. In a basement under its Times Square offices, stuffed into cabinets and drawers, the Times stores between 5 million and 7 million images, along with information about when they were published and why. Now, the paper is working with Google to digitize its huge collection.

The morgue (as the basement storage area is known) contains pictures going back to the 19th century, many of which exist nowhere else in the world. “[It’s] a treasure trove of perishable documents,” says NYT’s chief technology officer Nick Rockwell. “A priceless chronicle of not just The Times’s history, but of nearly more than a century of global events that have shaped our modern world.”